Thursday, October 05, 2006

BBC News 24 (again)

I will be live on BBC News 24 today, some time between 12:30 and 13:30.

Added afterwards: I didn't just do BBC News 24, but also BBC World News. It was all about Jurassic marine reptiles discovered on Svalbard by Jorn Hurum and colleagues (here is the BBC's online news report). Multiple ichthyosaur and plesiosaur specimens have been discovered there in close association, and in an excellent, articulated state. The most newsworthy animal is a large, near-complete or complete pliosaur, informally dubbed 'the beast' apparently, and with a total length of 8 m. That's very interesting if accurate, confirming without doubt a length exceeding 6 m for a Late Jurassic pliosaur, but as is reasonably well known there are indications that some pliosaur taxa reached and exceeded 10 and perhaps 15 m in length (Dave Martill, Les Noe and I are due to publish on this at some stage and have already published an article on the subject of giant pliosaurs in Dino Press magazine).

No new taxa have been mentioned in the reports on the new Svalbard finds - the only generic name used was Kimmerosaurus, a plesiosaur discovered in Dorset and named in the 1980s, and it is inferred that the animals are congeneric with British Kimmeridge Clay marine reptiles. But we'll see. Ultimately, the news concerns the discovery of these new specimens, and there is not an accompanying technical publication.

Incidentally this is blog post no. 99 for Tetrapod Zoology... stay tuned for the next one then. The accompanying photo has no relevance whatsoever- I just wanted to post it. It features Bob Nicholls and Richard Forrest (I'm in the middle). Homage to Bob, as he just sent me a bunch of stuff in the post.

Thanks for the comments. Yes Sharon it drives me nuts. Indeed a plesiosaur expert I know has become so frustrated by it that he will not refer to the Scottish entity by name, given that every journalist he ever talks to wants to mention it.

David is right: unfortunately it's the image that leaps to mind for most people whenever 'plesiosaur' is mentioned, and this is despite the fact that there aren't really any accounts from Loch Ness that sound in the least bit plesiosaur-like.

Links to this post:

About Me

Darren Naish is a science writer, technical editor and palaeozoologist (affiliated with the University of Southampton, UK). He mostly works on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs but has an avid interest in all things tetrapod. His publications can be downloaded at darrennaish.wordpress.com. He has been blogging at Tetrapod Zoology since 2006. YOU ARE CURRENTLY AT A VERY OLD VERSION OF TET ZOO: for modern articles, go to: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/ And check out the Tet Zoo podcast at tetzoo.com!